Without Consent

by Frances Fyfield

  Bailey felt slightly out of date and ashamed of it. He and Ryan’s colleague were padding around one another like cats, with her muttering, I’ll make you a cup of tea, shall I, treating him with condescension because this was her territory not his, adding in a touch of sarcasm with the sugar. For Lord’s sake, the man could read; he’d read the files; why did he want to chat again, and why here? Lucky for him there was no ongoing investigation, no late-night allegation, no current attack which would demand that she sat here with the complainant for one day, two, three, as long as it took to piece together a statement which said it all with minimal need for revision. The Rape House was redundant for a few blessed hours and, even in the heat, felt chilly.

  ‘What was it you wanted to know, sir?’

  ‘How many of these cases get as far as the Crown Prosecution Service?’ he asked mildly. The easy questions came first.

  ‘About half. There’s no point them seeing the complete non-starters, is there? A DCI has to mark them off, though. No point sending them the false allegations either.’

  ‘Many of those?’

  She fiddled with her hands in her lap, feeling faintly treacherous.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any particular reason why, do you think?’

  Sally Smythe warmed to a theme. Perhaps this austere man, whom Ryan had mentioned so often, really wanted to know.

  ‘There’s always been a lot, but it’s hardly political correctness to say so. Sexual attack and women’s rights get a high profile. Probably more complaints now because it’s common knowledge we take them seriously, so the rotten complaints increase in proportion. Girls know they risk nothing in coming to us. They get kid-glove treatment, no recriminations, no lectures. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not over-cynical, nor was Ryan, but a lot of the time we’re a free counselling service. Victims they may be, but not always victims of rape.’

  Bailey frowned. Sally did not scent disapproval; she didn’t scent anything; his lack of reaction disorientated her.

  ‘Was Ryan tolerant about that?’

  ‘Very. Although he did less of the interviewing than we did. Obviously, some of them don’t want a man in the room. There’s always two of us. When he was here, there was always a woman officer as well.’

  He stirred his tea and smiled at her. The effect on his gaunt face was almost shocking, making her respond with a grin before she knew it had happened.

  ‘Give me a typical outline for a false claim. If there is such a thing as typical.’

  She thought quickly and shrugged.

  ‘A woman or a girl says she’s been raped, attacked, say, three days earlier. She’s thought about it, wants to complain, but she’ll give three different versions of how it happened. The description of the attacker will vary too, but she won’t know his name, even if she says she’s seen him around. We don’t try and trip her up; she does it herself, trying to tell us things which can’t be proved or disproved, not clever enough to get it right. Sometimes it’s sheer fantasy, sometimes a real event from some time past, or a real event distorted, sometimes it’s straight off the telly. Troubled ladies. Then there’s the semi-false, like, oh, I dunno, someone having it off with a family friend, relative, something; wanting to tell themselves it was rape when what worries them is the fact they consented, or were outmanoeuvred. Then there’s those getting revenge on boyfriends. Or hiding an illicit encounter.’

  ‘Do you always know the liars?’

  She hesitated, outraged. Liars was a harsh description for the desperate.

  ‘Yes, I think so. After several dozen, yes. I didn’t to start with, nor did Ryan. You learn from the ones who tell the truth. There’s a difference; it hits you in the eyes.’

  She was becoming a touch impatient, slightly self-conscious, felt as if she was giving evidence which could be used against her. She was not fond of the sound of her own voice. Bailey had uncurled himself, begun pacing. You would never hold down my kind of job, sir, she wanted to yell at him: the person asking questions is supposed to ask in a manner which will put the person answering at ease, and then keep them there; it says so in the training manual. Her mind ran on to other things to fill the silence. Pathos and bathos, such as how to get back from the lab the patchwork quilt on which a brave and honest victim had been raped and buggered by two burglars. The quilt had been made out of cut-offs from her children’s clothes, pieces of it torn in the process of analysis for stains, but she still wanted it back, if only to prove that the one set of memories it invoked were far more important than the other.

  That’s what I deal with too, she wanted to tell Bailey: bravery. And that’s what Ryan was good at. Finding the truth.

  ‘What I really want to know,’ Bailey said carelessly, as if all previous conversation was irrelevant, ‘is why Ryan kept this file?’ He was flourishing a slim folder, using it to fan himself before he handed it across.

  ‘Which file?’ she asked stupidly, blushing as if Bailey had unearthed something incriminatory. There was no such thing, after all, as a totally clean record. If he were to delve around in anyone’s career, even if their daily progress was far less documented than that of any police officer, this spy could always find some embarrassing piece of shit. Even furry little rabbits leave turds. It must have been Ryan who said that.

  Bailey sat and the room grew smaller. Putting on his glasses failed to make him human. He rose again and pulled open the fussy venetian blinds, letting in light through the small window-panes. The blinds had always stuck before, even when new – Ryan had comments for them, too – but these long fingers of his older mentor commanded obedience out of inanimate things and, suddenly, there was light. Sally was afraid of Bailey, the way, as a child, she had been afraid of the old woman in the story who lived in the forest in a cottage made of cake.

  The computer print in the file blurred in front of her eyes. She sat bolt upright, reading the faint lettering, resentful, ready to come up with any old answer. The print was made for daylight. She was half aware that Bailey had left the room; there was a distant flush of the lavatory cistern and the sound of the kettle boiling again. Then he was back. Sounds echoed in an unoccupied house. More tea, as if to prove he could make it better. She hated tea, the drink of comfort and a swollen bladder.

  The windows needed cleaning, she noticed; he made her aware of such details. They were smudged rather than filthy, but enough to deserve attention.

  ‘I know what it looks like,’ she said. ‘He’s got the names and addresses and descriptions of several no-hopers. Girls who’ve been in here. Cases which’ll go no further. And their witnesses, few that there are. He’s got that disco girl and Shelley Pelmore, the one he’s supposed to have raped. And I suppose you’re thinking it may be his version of a little black book, aren’t you?’

  ‘They have one thing in common,’ Bailey said evenly. ‘All those names. All those girls, women, I mean; he’s quite specific about that, they’re all unmarried. Perhaps one or two of them would appreciate a visit from a good-looking sympathetic policeman. Liars maybe, vulnerable maybe, but so far, incapable of completing their accusations and maybe needing a nice broad shoulder, or something of the kind.’

  She would have flared at him like a rocket hitting the ceiling in that confined space; she could, after all, see exactly the way it looked. To the naked eye this small compendium of names and addresses was horrifying. We do not rely on photos of victims, she wanted to say, but surely he knew, even in his old-fashioned way, how that would make them feel. We make pictorial histories; we write notes as if computers did not exist. Here was Ryan’s inventory of the victims who had never got beyond the DCI’s no-action dictate. Not all of them; only some: five, or was it six? Bailey seemed drunk on tea. It was an added insult that he had the kind of long lean frame which need never resort to saccharin in order to keep it in that awkward state of angular thinness. Skeleton on legs, Ms Smythe thought, despising him with a clarity of thought which took in the file, too. Her face was red and chubby. It w
as her turn to get up and pace the room.

  ‘It wasn’t a file for Ryan’s personal use. It was ours. Ours; the product of ’ours and ’ours; oh, he did like a pun. If you’d read further, you’d see.’

  ‘What would I see?’ he asked gently.

  She sat, but moved again.

  ‘Oh, I can’t expect you to understand his code. Or to see why there was any sense in him recording these particular women, I mean, or the kinds of places they lived in, what jobs they did. Even Shelley Pelmore’s friend; you see they all had jobs.’

  ‘Jobs, I presume, they wouldn’t want to lose? By doing silly things like shouting rape for the second time, for instance? Unlikely, also to report a smiling police officer at the door with a bottle of vino?’

  Sally forced herself to stay calm.

  ‘Look, you were the one who talked about gut reactions, I didn’t, and he didn’t much. Oh, for Christ’s sake, the gut digests, doesn’t it? Look. What we’ve got on this patch is a serial sexual pervert. He’s been around for a while. He doesn’t have an established way of doing anything, sir, but he rapes without trace, and he may have killed without trace. All the ladies in this file are those who would not, or could not, complete a statement, however long we gave them. They could not, would not, name an assailant. They were blurred in their accounts, they described fantastical things … There was never any forensic evidence …’

  ‘They were dead ringers for the false allegations you describe. No names, no precision, change of story. Vulnerable ladies. Fantasists maybe; unhappy, maybe. Ideal for a man with his prick out at every traffic light.’

  It was at that point she twisted her left hand into the cord of the awkward venetian blinds of the doll’s house which was the Rape House; regretting politics, regretting everything apart from the fact that if Ryan was going to be done to death on evidence such as this, she had better put the record straight.

  ‘Look, you sanctimonious, dirty-minded bastard. They weren’t even the prettiest. Can’t you read?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Bailey said humbly. She continued at the same speed, well beyond listening, her voice stronger and stronger.

  ‘This was Ryan’s collection. It has a system, you see. A small collection, you will note, not quite the stuff of a little black book. A few witnesses, maybe working alongside, giving evidence of victims’ habits, maybe a link. What we think these girls had in common was one single perpetrator of whom they were ashamed. Some nameless shitface. And Ryan’s got the pathologist he’s spoken to on the file as well. No one would dare seduce her.’

  ‘I know the pathologist,’ Bailey said. ‘She’s very attractive. And I don’t understand,’ he added, sounding obtuse, a man without visible gut and all too apparent guile. ‘Don’t understand.’

  She took a deep breath, spoke carefully.

  ‘The ones in this file are the real no-hopers; nowhere to go, no names, no forensic, nothing to toy with.’ She was so close she could have spat in his eye, which was exactly what she wanted to do. ‘But they were the ones we believed. We believed them. You hear me? They had no case and we believed them.’

  The cord from the venetian blinds came away in her hand and she sat down abruptly.

  ‘The problem is, sir, no one believes us.’

  ‘Perhaps I should go and see them. Check the black-book theory.’

  She laughed.

  ‘You do that, sir. Not a long list, is it? Especially since two of them are dead.’

  There was a moment, later on, when he sat in a pub, nursing a half pint and mulling over what Sally Smythe had told him, that Bailey missed Ryan so intensely it was painful. And pathetic, he told himself, to find no pleasure in a drink unless that silly fool was sitting next to him. Ryan had a rare cunning for finding an excuse to get into a pub. He could fabricate an informer who must be seen, or a rumour that the drinks were free, but Bailey had never thought that such petty deceptions made Ryan a liar. He was fond of conspiracy theories, though; capable of inventing drama when life was too dull to be endured, and plenty capable of getting Sally Smythe to go along with some fantastic theory if he believed in it himself, even if his commitment to the idea had some ulterior motive.

  What theory and how fantastic? Bailey spelt it out to himself, as explained by Ms Smythe, a woman under Ryan’s influence, of course. Oh, what a joy it would be to have the luxury of listening to someone and believing what they said without a second thought.

  Ryan’s theory hinged on his belief that there was, out there, a rapist with a difference. Quite a different animal to the rabid man who leapt out of bushes to satisfy a sudden surge of lust on any female, of whatever age, who happened to be passing. Different, also, to the ex-lover, raping out of revenge, or the sly next-door neighbour or date rapist who mixed rape with seduction and pretence. These were merely distant cousins to Ryan’s rapist. One way and another they wanted sex. This one wanted gratification of a peculiar kind.

  Bailey looked around the bar. No candidates here. Ordinary men with ordinary desires and shirtsleeves.

  At best, at his most normal, this creature was a performing trickster, a manipulator, who learnt as he went along. A man who wanted to tease and control, who made up the rules en route, sometimes clumsy with it, because the delight, of course, was crude. The achievement was to leave a victim so ashamed that, even if they began the formalities of a complaint, they would never complete the process.

  It was an awful pint in a pub for those on the dole, with the Catholic church about next door. Downhill were the train termini and a view of London, swathed in a mist of heat.

  A foul kind of magician, then, this mythical attacker, with blunt factual Ryan on his tail. Possibly a man with allies. Or a figment of Ryan’s overfevered imagination, created to add purpose to the sometimes mundane and ever-seedy business of the Rape House. A fiction to allow him to preserve the names of the fantasists; keep a dossier of vulnerable women who might, after all, like indoor love with a married man, no strings attached.

  The door of the pub burst open. A young woman with a dog, regretting the row of her entrance, went outside and did it again, only quieter, as if the second entrance would make her invisible. Something to sell, or buy, perhaps; nothing to celebrate.

  Bailey could not see subtle plotting as part of Ryan’s stock-in-trade, not for the sake of sex alone, unless he saw himself as some romantic counsellor, helper of the afflicted. That was more like it for a heavily romantic man who still believed that people could be helped despite their own resistance. He lied sometimes; an honest liar. Try that for a character reference, as if any character reference was going to help a policeman charged with rape, or save him from the extra brutality reserved in prison for his kind.

  The thought made Bailey sick. His stomach growled.

  If Ryan were put on trial, on the decision of some separate faceless bunch of lawyers whose decisions Bailey felt he could quite safely predict, the defendant could be acquitted. Easier, for such a good-looking man with so much to lose, charged with such an offence; the jury might not have it: they were soft on police officers. Ryan could come out of there, the exonerated darling of the tabloid press, but Bailey despised that kind of result. He was either innocent or guilty, not to be consigned to that half-life of disbelief in between.

  Look at the black book, then, find an excuse.

  The bottom line was wanting him free.

  ‘Well? What did she say?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Anna, of course. Who did you think I meant?’

  ‘Rose, if I was going to tell you, do you think I’d do it here?’

  ‘Oh, see what you mean.’

  The Central Line of the underground was tolerable for once, although not a suitable venue to discuss anything personal, even for someone as uninhibited as Rose. They sat together; Rose fished into her purse for a list.

  ‘All we’ve got to buy, Aunty H, is a complete transformation of me for less than a hundred pounds. Inclusive of shoes, bikini and a full frontal l
obotomy. Got to put the old me through the mangle of the Dickins & Jones sale and collect a fully-fledged wifeling at the other end. Got that?’

  ‘I thought you said you wanted a dress.’

  ‘Oh, that too. I don’t think I’ve had a dress since I was twelve.’

  Rose would be married in an outfit yet to be found. She had drawn the line at a frock of virginal white, not on account of any hint of hypocrisy it might imply about her lifetime’s experience, but because she thought white was tame. The closest she had got was a sort of ivory shirt, tried on beneath Helen’s critical eye and giving rise to smothered laughter in a changing-room. Rose had resembled a waif in someone else’s silken dishcloth, her skin bleached by the sheen of the material; a sort of sickly bimbo without style. Suits she could handle, dresses not, but she still craved a dress. She longed to flounce away from her own reception with a wobble of fluffy skirt.

  ‘Hope Michael’s in when I get home tonight,’ Rose announced cheerfully. ‘As of yesterday, he was leaving for Timbuctoo.’

  Never mind the perfidy and wickedness she dealt with on a daily basis, if wonderful, solid, kindly Michael were to scoot, do a bunk, lose his bottle about Rose, then Helen really would lose her faith in human nature. It was frayed already, but not that much.

  ‘’S all right. He’s twitchy, that’s all. I mean, he’s the one with all the family complications I ain’t got. He’s the one who’s got to cope with his Aunty Mary, Uncle Stephen and ’orrible little cousin, Jim. To say nothing of all his mates at work, ribbing him, warning him marriage is the end of life as he knows it, and telling him he shouldn’t be marrying someone like me. He’s bound to listen sometimes. I can see the pressure, really. Thank God for his mother. Are all men such babes, Aunty H?’

  She seemed unfazed, much to Helen’s relief. Opposite her seat, a man lowered his newspaper to look at them. His eyes rested first on the tube map above their heads; then he appeared to examine the roof of the carriage; then stared briefly at Helen, longer at Rose, frankly curious. Rose noticed.